A Final Word On Torture?

UPDATE: V: A "new report issued this morning by Amnesty International charges that the Obama administration has effectively granted impunity to the practitioners of torture, and that its reluctance to address the issue 'not only leaves the USA in serious violation of its international legal obligations, it increases the risk that history will repeat itself when a different president again deems the circumstances warrant resort to torture, enforced disappearance, abductions or other human rights violations.' . .

At this point, it certainly doesn’t seem inconceivable that in response to a major national security threat, the U.S. could once again decide it needs to 'torture some folks.'"

Read Slate, Could America Torture Again?

UPDATE IV:  "Dick Cheney gave an interview that illustrated why it was so imprudent to abandon the taboo against torture and indulge in implausible hypotheticals. 13 years ago, Americans were arguing over whether it should be legal to torture a known terrorist if we knew it could stop a mass casualty attack on a major city. Now a former vice-president is defending the torture of innocent people."

Read The Atlantic, Dick Cheney Defends the Torture of Innocents.  

UPDATE III:  "The Senate's report on torture describes the Central Intelligence Agency as not just nauseatingly brutal, but also dishonest and ineffective. The report finds that the agency lied to the Bush administration, Congress and the public to hide the fact that an incompetently managed program of torture was failing to produce useful intelligence."

Read the Washington Post, Rectal feeding is exactly what it sounds like.  

UPDATE II: Reading "the stomach-churning findings of the 500-page executive summary [of the the Senate intelligence committee’s report on torture], the only part cleared for declassification, reinforces its importance. No one can review this account without feeling horror and shame, and without feeling anger at the degree to which public officials and the public itself were misled about what was being done in the name of national security.

Among the conclusions: So-called enhanced interrogation was 'not an effective means of obtaining accurate information.' Instead, “multiple CIA detainees fabricated information, resulting in faulty intelligence.”

Meanwhile, the interrogations 'were brutal and far worse than the CIA represented to policymakers and others.' The techniques included, in addition to waterboardings that amounted to near-drownings, detainees being kept awake for up to 180 hours, detainees subjected to 'rectal rehydration' and detainees kept shackled in total darkness in dungeon-like conditions.

Even as the CIA mistreated detainees, it submitted false claims about the effectiveness of the interrogation techniques and misled the Justice Department and others about what it was doing. Its claims of counterterrorism successes were 'wrong in fundamental respects,' at best corroborating information already available or acquired before the application of enhanced interrogation."

Read the Washington Post, Exposing the CIA’s stain on America.  

UPDATE: One shameful example of our "endless borderless war against an emotional state," and its constitutional travesty, the military tribunals "designed by President Bush, implemented by President Obama and inspired by President Kafka". 

Read Slate, The Guantánamo Memoirs of Mohamedou Ould Slahi, How the United States kept him silent for 12 years.

And read these previous posts:

Does the Star-Spangled Banner Wave Over the Land of the Torturers?

WWJT (Who Would Jesus Torture) and

Bush, the Hypocrite-in-Chief

Then read this article from the Washington Post, Treatment of Terror Suspects a 'Collective Failure.'